10 percent of September iPhone sales were for unlocks, claims analyst

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster is jumping into the pool of speculation …

No one is exactly sure how many iPhones there are in the wild that have been unlocked. Members of the iPhone Dev Team claim that there could be "several hundred thousand," while analyst Shaw Wu reminds us that the number is probably very small. Piper Jaffray Gene Munster has joined the group in its own speculations, which he pegs at roughly 10 percent of all iPhone sales in September.

Unfortunately, Munster's methodology for coming to this conclusion is... well, not very scientific. "In late September we spent 12 hours counting iPhone, iPod and Mac sales in Apple stores across the country," he wrote in a research note seen by AppleInsider. "During our store checks we noticed many people buying iPhones in the maximum 5 per customer allotments, which we believe were being purchased to be unlocked and operated on carriers other than AT&T"

He goes on to note that one Apple retail employee acknowledged that the sales of so many phones at a time indicated that people were planning to unlock them. And sure, that's a reasonable assumption to make (we tend to agree, personally). But without actual counts of which iPhones were going to be unlocked, Munster's numbers mostly amount to more speculation.

That said, let's assume that his estimation is true and perform some exceptionally rough calculations. Apple sold 1 million iPhones in its first 74 days, which averages out to about 13,513 iPhones per day. September has 30 days in it, which (assuming the number of iPhones sold per day is consistent, which we know is not actually the case), that leaves us with just over 405,000 iPhones sold in September. 10 percent of that is 40,539. That's not "several hundred thousand," but if true, that would still be a lot of iPhones that aren't (or weren't) running on AT&T.

Whether the release of the 1.1.1 firmware update has hampered this allegedly bustling black market for unlocked iPhones remains to be seen. Perhaps Munster can tell us whether he believes there has been a change when we hear from him again next month.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui